Signed Distant Field on MultiPacker

Documentation Pages of MultiPacker

Signed Distant Field on MultiPacker

  • The real power of MultiPacker are beyond the Material baking and the Texture Packing, MultiPacker has a lot of functions based on the ussage of SDF and MSDF.

MultiPacker allows two forms of generate SDF:

-1 Resides on the Texture Node and on the Material Node, this method are coded on c++ internally and has been coded to Multicore Performance, at the moment dont have options to change the internal parameters.

sc_sdftexture

sc_sdfMaterial

-2 Are accesible via Material Instance, this was the initial method an works totally on gpu, some integrated GPUs crashes with some of the higher values, for that I take this method as a personal choice, The Base Material are located on the Plugin Content, “Material / Base” Folder.

sc_sdfMaterial

  • You can create a Material Instance from this Material and drop on the Multipacker Graph to have a SDF Mask with the Variables changed at your choice.

  • The Material are based on this Article from Ryan Brucks : https://shaderbits.com/blog/various-distance-field-generation-techniques

sc_sdfMaterial

Parameters Explanation:

-Texture Size: Always use a Par Number, only to avoid artifacts, a range from 16 to 512 can work easily bigger values can crash.

-Radius: Its the Size of the near pixels to calculate the distance field. Values acceptables can be from 4 to “Texture Size/ 4”, the bigger values have an higher increment of performance.

-Tex: Texture Input to calculate the Signed Distance Field.

-Channel Input: Threat as a boolean activation on channels, you can choice from RGBA channels, more than two channels selected can do artifacts and some unexpected results.

Multi Signed Distance Field on MultiPacker

  • MSDF its a more advanced technique of SDF, based on the thesis and work of Viktor Chlumsky https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen . The Technique works with vector graphics as SVG, I made a repository on Github with the code from MsdfGen compiled to x86-64, and a bat file to select and process a SVG on a few clicks, The quality of the results are better than SDF on a great number of scenarios.

    https://github.com/cheke/Msdf_BatSelector

# What Use:

  • After read the next part you need to know I used only SDF and MSDF from the Sizes of 16 to 64 pixels, to save the maximun possible of memory ussage.

-To solve some questions I can tell my personal ussage on my projects:

-SDF:

-Pros:

  • Its easy to Iterate.
  • If you want to combine some masks SDF from the same Texture its fast and easy. I want it to maintain the exact position of the image.
  • Works with every Texture.
  • Can be done internally on MultiPacker.

-Cons:

  • The Definition of the shape can be loosed on some cases. The resolution can be increassed but its out of my scope do it.

-Best Scenario:To nomal shapes on a Videogame you can use SDF.

-MSDF:

-Pros:

  • The deffinition and shape can be exactly to the SVG.

-Cons:

  • Shapes need to be clear with few bezier curves, more complicated need more resolution.
  • If you like extract some layers from the SVG its difficult, manually needs to be done and the layers will be dealigned from the original SVG.
  • Only works with SVG.
  • The iterations are harder.
  • Need to be processed via the compiled MSDFgen and imported to Unreal Engine.

-Best Scenarios:To a number of special Icons you can use MSDF and Logotypes.

Home Docs